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Gallery: The Top 10 Telescopes of All Time

A PopSci look at looking up

Posted 4.10.09 at 10:19 am 3 Comments

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European Southern Observatory

courtesy ESO

The observatory's 3.5-meter scope, the dryly named New Technology Telescope, was the first telescope in the world to have a computer-controlled main mirror. Even amateur scopes now have that technology. The ESO's suite of telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert also includes the Very Large Telescope array (pictured), Europe's flagship observatory. The ESO is also home to Europe's portion of the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-Millimeter Array, known as ALMA, an intercontinental collaboration with North America, east Asia and Chile. ALMA will be the highest observatory on Earth and the world's most advanced radio astronomy observatory. Which takes us to the next top observatory ...

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Read the article: The Top 10 Telescopes of All Time

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3 Comments

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sir-reptitious

04/11/09 at 3:08 am

Looking for The Very Large Array on Google satellite view I was amused to find that the northern-most tip of the VLA ends at several genuine crop circles. No joke.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Very+Large+Array&sll=34.080495,-107.618036&sspn=0....

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daddyvortex

04/13/09 at 6:45 pm

Sir-repititious:

I think you'll find the "crop cirles" are center pivot irrigation setups, pretty common out West.

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Spacegeek

04/15/09 at 7:07 pm

I like that you included Galileo's telescope. Easy to forget the pioneers but very important that we dont. Nice story.

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